In the 1830s, Charles Babbage, an English mathematician, conceived
of a mechanical computer that he called an analytical engine. He was far
from the first to invent a mechanical calculator; among his illustrious
predecessors was Blaise Pascal. But Babbage's engine was the first
that could perform complex operations by following sequential
instructions on punch cards-what's called "conditional
branching:' The era's technology was too coarse to manufacture
the finely machined parts such a device would require, and so it
languished, a road not taken. That is, until the punningly titled The
Difference Engine, co-written by cyberpunk wizards William Gibson
(author of Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive) and Bruce
Sterling (best known for Schismatrix and Islands in the Net). The novel
folds Steam Punk, a sci-fi style that deals in Victorian-era
technofantasies, into the duo's cybernetic preoccupations. Set
primarily in 1855 London, it imagines an alternative history in which
Babbage's analytical machine has become the cornerstone of a new
order.

In The Difference Engine's world, Babbage's brainchild
leads to political and social revolution and diverts technology to
alternate lines of development. Steam-powered gurneys chuff along the
streets of this book's London while steam-powered subways course
below them. Clothes not for the savants (as the learned aristocracy is
known) or the industrial rich are cut according to stylized engine
patterns. "Kinotroping" runs moving cards that project
changing images, which depend for their speed, and thus their appeal and
realism, on the skill of the "clackers " as the kinotropists
are known. One of the foremost clackers is a onetime medical student
named John Keats. Disraeli appears as a novelist/journalist. The Prime
Minister and leader of the ruling Industrial Radical Party is Lord
Byron, whose daughter Ada, the Queen of Engines, is at the heart of the
novel's fierce dark-lantern plotting. (The historical Lady Byron,
sometimes called the world's first programmer, developed a program
for Babbage's machine to calculate the complex sequence called
Bernoulli numbers.)

The British dominate world politics and economics.
"America" is fragmented into the U.S.A., the C.S.A., the
Republic of Texas, the Republic of California, unorganized territory
(the Midwest) and the Manhattan Commune, founded by German emigre Karl
Marx during the anti-draft uprisings of the Civil War. The French Empire
rules Mexico and the Southwest. The Russian Empire claims Alaska.
Implementing its balance-of-powers theory, Britain keeps them all at
odds via labyrinthine stratagems that are increasingly engine-driven.

Only France, with its Grand Napoleon Engine-a Babbage machine with
a hundred-plus miles of gearworks, almost double the capacity of the
fearsome British Central Statistics Bureau-can rival Britain's
control of its people. That's because only those two allied nations
can track their populations from cradle to grave via an assigned number.
Sound familiar? In The Difference Engine's alternative history, the
postindustrial growth of the nation-state leads to covert totalitarian
government nested within a liberal shell no matter what path technology
takes. After all, who besides governments and their corporate
underwriters can afford the expensive machinery? The underlying lesson
is classic cyberpunk: Scientific humanity creates technology, which then
determines everything from the models used to understand human nature
(cybernetics as the paradigm for the brain's functions, for
instance) to social organization and controls. Because technology
intensifies the authority of those who can buy it, its development is
inevitably channeled into heightened repression. Only on the margins is
a relatively free life possible.

So, the plots of The Difference Engine revolve around a typical
cyberpunk confluence-sex, money, the dark-side powers of technology,
doses of mysticism and their overall usefulness to the corporate
state-translated into a black comedy blend of fact and fantasy suitable
for Dickens's nineteenth century. Take Lady Ada Byron, a mostly
offstage presence who connects the narrative strands. A brilliant
mathematician now past her intellectual prime, she's also
promiscuous and deeply caught up in gambling debts and blackmail. Lady
Ada's major discovery, encoded on a series of odd engine cards, is
called the Modus, and is actually a version of Godel's Theorem. As
she explains it, "The execution of the so-called Modus Program
demonstrated that any formal system must be both incomplete and unable
to establish its own consistency. . . . The transfinite nature of the
Byron Conjectures were the ruination of the Grand Napoleon; the Modus
Program initiated a series of nested loops, which, though difficult to
establish, were yet more difficult to extinguish. The program ran, yet
rendered its Engine useless!"

Lady Ada and her underworld confederates/blackmailers had wanted to
use Modus as a gambling system. But in The Difference Engine it also
stands as the post-Gbdel, post-Heisenberg overarching metaphor for human
attempts at totalizing systems-political or mathematical or
fictional-that inevitably spin out of control. Think of the book as a
picaresque dystopia where the protagonists battle apparent evils they
only think they understand to produce outcomes they haven't chosen.
The search for the Modus, which gets stolen, passed around, hidden, and
finally uncovered and confiscated by the ever-growing British secret
police, is the twisted spine of the novel's complex tale.

Laurence Oliphant, head of Britain's secret police, sends the
savant Edward "Leviathan" Mallory (who has been given the
Modus cards by Lady Ada) to the Central Statistics Bureau. There, his
contact Wakefield, the chief clerk of the Quantitative Criminology
section, regularly runs cards on the bureau's huge engines to
ferret out information the secret policeman and his bosses need. For
Oliphant has a plan for how to use statistics and the huge engines:
" Mightn't we examine society, sir., with a wholly novel
precision and intensity? . . . Topics we now vaguely call police
matters, health matters, public services-but perceived, sir, as by an
all-searching, all-pervasive, a scientific eye!'" That strikes
the square-rigged Mallory as "a Utopian fantasy." But
Wakefield explains, " 'In theory, sir ... it is entirely
possible. We naturally keep a brotherly eye on the telegram-traffic,
credit-records, and such.' " Or, as Wakefield's assistant
notes with less bureaucratic gentility,""We have everyone in
Britain in our records. Everyone who's ever applied for work, or
paid taxes, or been arrested.' "

The plot ratchets into high gear from there on. A thick atmospheric
inversion, The Stink, finds London breaking out into a plague of looting
and rioting as everyone but the poorest citizens flees for the
countryside. In an extended set piece that lovingly parodies the British
tradition of the derring-do amateur, Mallory takes on a
Marxist/anarchist band of ragtag revolutionaries at their dockside
warehouse headquarters, aided only by three others.

Oliphant himself straddles the poetic and the scientific realms,
one of the fault lines in The Difference Engine demonstrated by the
relationship between the always offstage Lords Babbage and Byron. At
Byron's funeral his widow, the ironically named Iron Lady, bitterly
recalls that she was the true if secret engine behind the party's
success. It was she who linked Babbage and Byron with their mutually
exclusive talents, matching the impractical and impolitic scientist with
the passionate but hollow orator. It was also she who read the covert
reports and signed death sentences, vindicating herself by bloody
accounts: " Was not every civil evil we committed repaid, repaid
ten-fold; for the public good?' "

Oliphant is made of less inflexible stuff. Like Coleridge (at whose
American Susquehanna Phalanstery he finishes out his days in pursuit of
utopian ideals) or Emerson, he too dreams of the all-seeing Eye the
widowed Iron Lady invokes. But this engine-driven Eye's focus
doesn't seem to be the illumination Oliphant had in mind when he
began.

After an abortive attempt to steal the Modus, one of
Oliphant's agents is snatched, continuing the ongoing daisy chain
of covert activities. A sickened Oliphant says to Wakefield, " The
level of violence in this society ... or rather, I should say, the level
of unacknowledged violence, has become remarkable, don't you think,
Andrew?' . . . They'll erase us; Wakefield said. We'll
cease to exist. There'll be nothing left, nothing to prove either
of us ever lived. Not a check-stub, not a mortgage in a City bank,
nothing whatever.' 'Exactly what I'm on about,
Andrew.' Don't take that moral tone with me, sir,'
Wakefield said. Your lot began it, Oliphant-the disappearances, the
files gone missing, the names expunged, numbers lost, histories edited
to suit specific ends.... No, don't take that tone with
me."'

Oliphant could think of no reply-and in such a world, his silence
may be the beginning of wisdom. We have seen the engine, and it is us.

COPYRIGHT 1991 The Nation Company L.P.
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